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Essential Trip Making and Mode Substitution during COVID-19 Movement Restrictions in Nigerian Cities
Subject area: Science,Engineering and Technology · Area of research: Urban Transportation Planning
Abstract
Movement restrictions remove transport options, and what follows depends on what a household has left. We ask which trips proved non-deferrable in three Nigerian cities during the 2020 restrictions, and what replaced the modes that vanished. We surveyed 1,080 respondents across Lagos, Abuja and Ibadan on their travel before and during the restrictions, and weighted the sample so that its aggregate trip making reproduces an observed mobility series. Lagos and Abuja fell under a cessation of movement from 30 March 2020 while Ibadan had only a curfew, and the observed series confirms that contrast: workplace activity fell 59.5 and 58.9 percent against 28.0. Suspending the shared modes removed travel from their users at nearly twice the rate it did from car owners: 39.6 percent of minibus users and 35.9 percent of tricycle users made no trip at all against 21.9 percent of car owners, and where they did travel they walked. That is the distributional consequence of the policy, conditional on the level of service the orders left running. Whether a walkable fallback protects essential travel, and protects the poor most, is not identifiable here: the main effect survives at one of five distance thresholds, the interaction at two, and both vanish when distance enters continuously. Modeling availability explicitly, so that a suspended mode is absent from the choice set rather than merely unchosen, is this study’s most transferable product.
Keywords
travel behavior, movement restriction, mode substitution, trip deferrability, discrete choice, transport poverty, nigeria
How to cite this paper
@article{1722673,
author = {Oluwabusola Ajayi, Oladimeji Basit Alaka, Ridwan Tiamiyu},
title = {Essential Trip Making and Mode Substitution during COVID-19 Movement Restrictions in Nigerian Cities},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2020},
volume = {4},
number = {4},
pages = {442-465},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1722673.pdf},
abstract = {Movement restrictions remove transport options, and what follows depends on what a household has left. We ask which trips proved non-deferrable in three Nigerian cities during the 2020 restrictions, and what replaced the modes that vanished. We surveyed 1,080 respondents across Lagos, Abuja and Ibadan on their travel before and during the restrictions, and weighted the sample so that its aggregate trip making reproduces an observed mobility series. Lagos and Abuja fell under a cessation of movement from 30 March 2020 while Ibadan had only a curfew, and the observed series confirms that contrast: workplace activity fell 59.5 and 58.9 percent against 28.0. Suspending the shared modes removed travel from their users at nearly twice the rate it did from car owners: 39.6 percent of minibus users and 35.9 percent of tricycle users made no trip at all against 21.9 percent of car owners, and where they did travel they walked. That is the distributional consequence of the policy, conditional on the level of service the orders left running. Whether a walkable fallback protects essential travel, and protects the poor most, is not identifiable here: the main effect survives at one of five distance thresholds, the interaction at two, and both vanish when distance enters continuously. Modeling availability explicitly, so that a suspended mode is absent from the choice set rather than merely unchosen, is this study’s most transferable product.},
keywords = {travel behavior, movement restriction, mode substitution, trip deferrability, discrete choice, transport poverty, nigeria},
month = {October},
}